1990: October 27-November 2

30 October 2010

‘I cried and cried…’The Flying Doctors’ Tammy McIntosh (pictured) fights back tears as she talks to TV Week about the episode of the Nine Network drama to go to air this week. In this episode, Sister Annie Rogers (McIntosh) befriends abandoned 14-year-old Alex (Brendan Peel). She helps him find his grandmother, who dies days later, leaving him alone. Rogers fights to take responsibility for the teenager, but the Coopers Crossing doctors arrange for him to join a local family instead, leaving her shattered. McIntosh spent her childhood in a series of foster homes, making it easy to relate to the boy’s situation. “I didn’t consciously think about the story being too close to home, but I can see that now,” she told TV Week. “The scene where we had to say goodbye, I cried and cried. I just lost it. It was real for me.”

E Street’s bad boy moves to Ramsay Street! Richard Huggett, the E Street star whose character Sonny Bennett made a sudden exit from the series following the car bomb explosion, has signed up to Network Ten’s other soap, Neighbours. Huggett (pictured) enters the long-running series as a mystery man who turns up claiming to be the long-lost son of Jim Robinson (Alan Dale). “I’ve been a bad boy for a long time,” Huggett told TV Week. “So it will be an advantage to do something different. I’m looking forward to playing a character who won’t be quite so dark as Sonny.”

BBC snaps up Aussie showA new Australian children’s series which premieres on Nine this week has been bought by BBC for a record price. The Girl From Tomorrow, a sci-fi series produced by Film Australia, stars Andrew Clarke, Katharine Cullen and Melissa Marshall, with guest appearances by Grant Dodwell, Miles Buchanan and John Howard. Bruce Moir, managing director of Film Australia, declined to disclose the sum paid by BBC for the series, but confirms that it is a record. “It was a major decision for Film Australia to branch into children’s drama and we are thrilled at having negotiated this highly-successful sale,” he told TV Week. Moir says a sequel for the series is already in planning and that negotiations are taking place to sell the first series to countries other than the United Kingdom.

Briefly… Singer-actress Kaarin Fairfax has taken on a surprise career move with the announcement that she has agreed to present a new science program, Catalyst, for ABC. The six-part series is being shown in a daytime timeslot to capture the schools audience, and also features Fast Forward’s Mandy Salomon and Let The Blood Run Free’s Peter Rowsthorn.

ABC mini-series Come In Spinner has won a number of awards at the recent Australian Film Industry Awards presentation. Actress Rebecca Gibney (pictured) won the award for best actress in a mini-series, while the series also won for Best Direction and Best Mini-series. Frankie J Holden won the Best Actor award for his role in the ABC mini-series Police Crop.

Artists’ Services, the company which produces Fast Forward and Tonight Live With Steve Vizard, has signed a five-year development deal with the Seven Network. The company, headed by Steve Vizard and Andrew Knight, is already planning a 13-part drama series and other projects include a sitcom.

John Laws says…”Hosting an awards ceremony must be among the most difficult tasks any performer can be handed. The fact is, it takes a special kind of showbiz skill to tread the line between keeping viewers interested and the TV professionals satisfied. It’s to his credit, then, that Andrew Denton so ably managed the hosting of a major slice of the Australian Film Institute awards ceremony which screened on ABC. Denton resisted any desire to score cheap points with “industry” jokes and, as a result, the awards night was able to flow along freely.”

Program Highlights (October 27-November 2): Saturday: GTV9 crosses to the Gabba, Brisbane, for the final of the FAI Insurance Cup cricket. ABC’s Saturday afternoon sport includes English soccer and American NFL and NBA. SBS presents a the first two hours of the repeat presentation of drama series Always Afternoon.

Tuesday: In Beyond 2000 (HSV7), reporter Simon Reeve takes a ride in a flying boat, while Andrew Carroll meets a man who has predicted a major earthquake.

Wednesday: In E Street (ATV10), the aftermath of the car bomb explosion that claimed the lives of Chris (Paul Kelman), Megan (Lisbeth Kennelly) and Abby (Chelsea Brown), has Dr Elly Fielding (Penny Cook) fighting for her life.